Winter Olympic Themed Direct Mail

By Travis Lee

If you read my e-mail tips, you know I LOVE using current events in my marketing. There’s a big one coming up in February, the Winter Olympics. What better way to break through all the noise and clutter than by sending your clients, prospects or patients their very own gold medal! This is a great direct mail piece to cut the clutter and increase your response rates!

I suggest you click the link and read the short letter. Have you read the letter? Good, because what I’m going to talk about below won’t make any sense unless you’ve at least scanned through the letter.

Since you’re going to mail gold medals this month, I think it’s especially appropriate to send it to your “gold Medal” clients, your “A+” clients. Your own in-house list should always yield you the best results in direct mail, and really any marketing effort. If not, you’ve got an issue in how you communicate with your customers.

Be sure to tweak the letter and make it your own. Use your own language. However, the heavy lifting has been done for you here. The idea, the headline and tie-in to the event has already been done for you. Be sure to include guarantees, testimonials, endorsements etc. All the required elements of a good direct response sales letter.

You might want to spice up your offer with these ideas.

If you have a local Olympian who’s making headlines you may want to wrap something around their performance, i.e. 10% off everything just because, 15% for a bronze medal, 20% for Silver, 25% for gold, or something along those lines. People love celebrities and here’s a FREE way to use them.

You may also consider tying your promotion around the medal count. You could even donate a certain percentage of sales to the local Special Olympics. Anything that’s going to create a buzz is certainly worth trying.

Since you’ll being sending this piece to your “A+” clients, you’ll want to use all the marketing means at your disposal; email, phone, FAX, follow-up pieces, etc. I’m amazed at how few people use EVERYTHING they have available. Your results will only go up when you add multiple steps with multiple media. I strongly encourage you to use as many media as you can to increase response and profits.

A quick story on hosting “sales” and “specials.” Having a reason for an offer, such as this Olympic sale, or my birthday sale will always get you better response than simply having a “sale” for no reason. This is referred to as “reason why” copy, which means you actually have a reason why, and you explain it for both your deadline and your offer.

One of the best “reasons why” is an anniversary sale. In fact, for one of our businesses, American Retail Supply, we just celebrated our 40th Anniversary. When you give a reason why, people will accept it at face value. They’ll think to themselves, “Oh, that’s why I’m getting a discount” instead of being cautious or skeptical. Try “reason why” the next time you make an offer to your clients, I guarantee it will work.

Marketing Tip Readers Only Special

You didn’t think I’d highlight a new item and not have it spotlighted, did you? In fact, it’d be downright criminal. Though Jan. 17, 2014 at 5 PM you can get this BRAND NEW 3D Mail piece for 15% off!